From the Wall Street Seventeen to the LIBOR Sixteen, the history of the banking cartel

(It's called a criminal conspiracy, stoopid! And yes, Virginia, conspiracies do exist!)

LIBOR 16

The LIBOR rate fixing, which has finally received a bit of publicity, is truly mind-boggling enormous in the extent of the global thievery involved. An outstanding explanation can be found at this link below:

The "official" authorities in London are finally acting, as some are also in the USA. Some analysts are now mentioning that this rate fixing not only goes back some years in the past decades but may go back to the early 1990s.

But does it really just begin there? Was it simply one discrete event, as those clueless pundits, who can never locate their own genitals, would have us believe once again, along with those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

The Wall Street Seventeen

In the aftermath of the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, a number of intensive congressional investigations took place. Some would later explain how Rockefeller secretly shipped oil to the Nazis, the financial connections between the Mellons, du Ponts and I.G. Farben and the Third Reich, Morgan's financing of the fascist Mussolini's invasion of Libya (oil resources), etc., but one would be most important, the TNEC study (The National Economic Committee study), which would uncover the extreme concentration of corporate control by a select number of banks.

This is a most interesting date, as that was the year when the super-rich in American really began moving their wealth and ownership and investment instruments over to foundations and trusts which had been accorded tax-exempt status (to effectively hide their wealth and owernship, and for tax evasion and avoidance), along with other financial changes, in legislation passed in 1913, along with the Federal Reserve Act, the 16th Amendment (allowing for collection of taxes to repay interest from private loans to gov't due to the Federal Reserve Act), and the oil depletion allowance.

The antitrust suit was dismissed, thanks to the Eisenhower administration coming to power and replacing the antitrust team with others who would perform in a most lackadaisical manner.

Now, please don't assume that the 17 banks were owned by 17 separate entities; there was quite a bit of concentration there as well.

While the names of the banks have changed, and consolidation has taken place, the overall ownership remains essentially the same, and it's called a "cartel" --- and a criminal conspiracy.

The Debt Creators

In response to the global mega-rigging of financial markets, the debt creators, erroneously referred to as highly productive "wealth creators" ad nauseum (by those aforementioned pundits), have amassed their wealth by the gargantuan creation of debt and debt instruments, which they sold, and then socialized said debt --- moving it into the public sector, and claiming the masses must experience never-ending austerity to pay off their debt.

An excellent article by Mijin Sha at Demos partially illustrates this point:

Posted by sgt_doom]]>
Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:51:31 -0800The Stranger
Posted by Brooklyn Reader]]>
Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:47:35 -0800The Stranger
Posted by dbgill56]]>
Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:43:27 -0800The Stranger
In short, it had all of the elements lacking from the four licensed television broadcast stations who produced yesterday's rumor-fest here in New York.

Posted by Brooklyn Reader]]>
Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:41:38 -0800The Stranger
The mother apparently had no active connection with the school and was never a teacher there. Adam Lanza reportedly was a genius who did high school in one year (and then spent his life at home, as a goth...). So why target a school and a class of students that had nothing to do with his own life?

And no one is talking about the new breed of early 20s shooter. What trauma could possibly be happening to a person living only 2 decades to make them behave as if there is no tomorrow and everyone from a 1st grader on up is a 2 dimensional target on an LCD?
Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe]]>
Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:38:56 -0800The Stranger
Posted by Gern Blanston]]>
Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:21:48 -0800The Stranger
Posted by Tacoma Traveler]]>
Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:03:35 -0800The Stranger
Looking over yesterday's Slogorrhea, one person's reaction was super shiny to me - Cienna Madrid's. Not just as a writer but as a person navigating her response and trying to shed a little light rather than just add heat, even from way over here in the corner.

Those posts talking to local NRA members and interviewing her schoolteacher friend - they were an unforgettable part of how that day unfolded, at least to me, and represent the best of what Slog can still offer sometimes.
Posted by gloomy gus]]>
Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:02:58 -0800The Stranger
Another part of me tries to charitably understand our ravenous hunger for DETAILS! as 1) a way to learn from experience, to make choices in our own lives that will prevent getting into similar situations, and 2) a wish to internalize as much of the event as possible in order to feel empathy for those involved and thus figure out what we could do to help.

Posted by Cato the Younger Younger]]>
Sat, 15 Dec 2012 09:15:52 -0800The Stranger
Do we have to wait for the New Yorker or Rolling Stone to do a properly-researched in-depth article on this story? What the fuck is wrong with daily journalism today?

This was a horrible event of local and national significance. The public deserves a clear, factually-correct account of it. Sourcing unofficial speculation from unnamed "law enforcement sources" does no one a service, especially when it's wrong. After spending a couple hours yesterday flipping local news channels here in New York, all of which covered the aftermath through the entire day, my head was spinning with all the conflicting "information" and bullshit.

Today we read that shooter's (who was originally named as his brother) mother was not, in fact, a teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary at all. Yesterday, every channel was echoing each other in reporting that not only was she, but she was shot in "her classroom" at the school.

Local television news has always been a septic tank of pretty "communications majors," but the print media has usually been better. As of today, I'm convinced that there aren't many professionals worthy of the name "journalist" working in the business anymore.